Go ahead, nominate whoever you want. It could be anyone…a teacher, a preacher, a project manager, a woman, a community organizer, someone with a real job…even you! (Seriously, don’t nominate yourself, you self-serving ass.)

Nominate as many times as you like. Nominate until you sprain something. Nominate until you’re about to collapse from exhaustion. Nominate until you’ve been fired from your job, and your wife and children have left you because you just won’t get up from the computer. It really doesn’t matter because the vast majority of your nominations will be ignored! Ignored, I tell you!

Of course I’m kidding. The truth is each nomination is carefully scrutinized by a team of trained nomination experts. Only the freshest and juiciest nominations, hand-picked by migrant workers and carried on foot to our production facility in Ripon, Wisconsin, will be good enough to make the final cut.

The award—handed out at the annual ‘Stache Bash slated for Saturday, December 4th, 2010 in St. Louis, Missouri—recognizes the person or human clone who has best represented, contributed, or has just not done any irreparable damage to the Mustached American community during the past year.

Nominations will only be accepted until Friday, October 8th. After that, you’re Shiite out of luck, Muganda. So put your nominatin’ boots on and get crackin’!

So it is in this vein that we dissect the field of this year’s Capital One All-America Mascot Team, offering up some tidbits you may not have known about the costumed characters – and undoubtedly some you already do. We’ll also pick our favorite for the 2010 Capital One National Mascot of the Year.

There are 12 weekly head-to-head match ups. The mascots with the best win/loss records make the playoffs starting November 22, and the final winner will be pronounced Capital One National Mascot of the Year during the Capital One Bowl January 1.

As might be expected, The Bird is one intense guy. He’s kind of like that guy you play basketball with that wears a headband and hip checks everyone because he’s way too serious about what was just a friendly pickup game. When asked about competing in the 2010 Mascot Challenge, The Bird exclaimed, “I will live in fame, or go down in flame!”

Then he doused himself in gasoline, lit himself on fire, and jumped out a two-story window. Like I said, this guy is intense.

As the summer months wane and fall approaches, the smell of football is in the air. As anyone that has had to endure them well knows, wake up too early any given morning in late August or early September, and for some reason it just feels like “two-a-days”.

Even if you’ve never experienced a 5 a.m. flashback to four-hour practices and small, enclosed rooms fouled with the funk of 50 unwashed girdles (yes, that is what they are called), you still know the distinct smells of fall, and this can mean only one thing: the beginning of another college football season.

For fans of the Fighting Illini, there always seems to be the extra added stench of failure – which is way worse than 50 girdles mind you – and this go-round appears to be no different.

That’s why it’s with extremely low, low expectations that Illinois begins 2010 by saying hello to the Missouri Tigers and goodbye (and good riddance) to the State Farm Arch Rivalry game Saturday, Sept. 4th at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, with kickoff set for 11:30 a.m.

In the spirit of shameless attempts at self-promotion (self-degradation?) involving chicken, we at Grubb Hub not-so-proudly present the following short, independent film. It’s once again brought to you by our associates at the American Mustache Institute – as part of their ‘Stache Scale Analysis series that samples and rates products from the Mustached American perspective.

In addition to the doctor sporting the night club velvet rope ‘stache, this video also stars a real, live chicken. No, it’s not the San Diego Chicken, Chicken Little, or even Colonel Sanders. Those guys are all too expensive (or too dead).